The emerging paradigm of Catholic spirituality and theology

One faith, centred on Jesus, has many expressions. Most obvious are the many Christian denominations. Within Catholicism too, many spiritualities have grown up over the centuries, such as the Benedictine, Franciscan and Jesuit traditions.

In the mid-20th century, Neo-Scholasticism collapsed. Since then there has been an explosion of research, study and writing on every aspect of Christianity, and the pace has picked up even more since 2000. Theology can no longer be a single, stand-alone system. Thomas Aquinas could still pull it together in his Summa Theologiae, a kind of encyclopedia of the theology of his day. Back then, faith meant accepting a literal reading of scripture and believing the traditions handed down. People knew nothing of evolution and had little sense of how history unfolds. That kind of synthesis is no longer possible.

Medieval theologians, and the neo-scholastics after them, could lean on metaphysics and the authority of earlier thinkers. Empirical science, along with existentialist and personalist philosophy, challenged this. We now want real evidence, and theology needs firmer ground if it is to answer the questions of our time.

The human sciences, such as psychology, anthropology and sociology, give us fresh words and ideas for understanding Christianity and sharing its message today. They give the symbolic, story-telling language of scripture a new voice that can reach wider audiences.

Three developments mark the contemporary landscape: the discovery of evolution, a new awareness of historical development, and what are called the “turn to the person” and the “turn to interiority”.

Knowing how the universe, the Earth and humans have evolved helps us understand what it means to be human, and our place in a constantly changing world that is complex, beautiful and powerful.

The record of human achievements and failures shows us the social and cultural settings that shaped people over thousands of years. We realise that we cannot expect Aristotle, Augustine or Aquinas to answer the questions we face today.

Since the mid-1900s, people have become more aware of their own autonomy and agency. Carl Jung called this movement individuation. It is not simply individualism, and it is not just a refusal to obey authority. Nor does it reject community. Instead, it corrects an imbalance by recognising that both the person and relationships are essential to human development. It also pushes back against the earlier overemphasis on “objectivity”, and the belief that we must avoid anything subjective to reach the truth.

As a result, attention has shifted. Where once the focus was mainly on the community, today the individual and the community are seen to be working together to drive human development. Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Viktor Frankl, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Gandhi and Pope Francis all helped bring this shift about. It puts more weight on self-knowledge, personal experience and values.

The turn to interiority is about noticing what goes on inside us when we experience, know, decide and love. It begins with questions such as, “What am I doing when I am knowing?”, and leads us to see our inner workings more clearly. Everyone experiences, imagines, has insights, knows, makes decisions and loves. Most of the time though, we do these things without noticing how. Yet these are the very processes by which we gain knowledge and wisdom, shape our character and grow as persons. When we understand them and use that understanding on purpose, we have a real basis for thinking critically and for discerning what is right and good.

Bernard Lonergan gives a detailed account of these inner processes in his books Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology.

These developments (the discovery of evolution, awareness of history, the turn to the person and the turn to interiority) among others, are features of the current change of epoch. We now understand better how people grow within relationships, and how we can deliberately guide and shape our own lives.

As this understanding of what it means to be truly human spreads, it shapes a new paradigm of human living. That paradigm is steadily becoming the setting for faith, spirituality and theology.

Theology today is a lively, complex field made up of many specialisations. For Lonergan, its unity comes from the way human consciousness works: a human experiencing, understanding, deciding and loving. These operations are personal to each one of us but we can share, find resonances in others and develop positions through relationships.

As we gain a grasp of our own interiority, the emphasis shifts from theory to lived experience. Coherence and unity are found in our common drive toward transcendence and in building relationships of love.

Because the emerging theology is grounded in personal experience, insight and values, it will inevitably bring a variety of understandings of God, faith, revelation, Jesus and many other things long treated as settled. In practice, this simply brings into the open something that has always been true: Catholics differed widely in how well they understand and accept handed-down doctrines.